Chapter 108
Annoyed and frustrated, Anastasia returned to her room to rest, not wanting to think about anything anymore. She was curious about her past and why Kieran and the rest didn’t want to tell her, but she knew that, with how headstrong they were, they wouldn’t tell her even if she pressed them about it. In the end, when she asked Kieran about it, he didn’t even brush her off. He just directly told her that she had to find it out herself.
"So I’m on a scavenger hunt for my own past..." she sighed as she lay in her bed, looking at the gray raven feathers adorning her forearms. "And... they definitely won’t tell me how close I am to the truth... Or it will be much later..." With another sigh, she closed her eyes. If they wouldn’t hand her the truth, she would take any hints that existed to investigate. But she was still unhappy. The longer she lacked memories, the more questions appeared in her mind.
The questions were rapidly changing and twisting, drawing an image in her mind, but one question, or a doubt, maybe hope, remained. She was hoping that what she found out once she started investigating wouldn’t piss her off. She didn’t want to lose the friends she had made since she lost her memories. She valued the friendships.
Turning onto her side, Anastasia frowned. She didn’t like the fact that Michelle, Kieran and Ivona had already decided not to tell her anything, but despite the irritation curling in her chest, she didn’t hate them for it. At least, not yet. She didn’t know what was about to come. She had no way of knowing.
Her three friends had ways to guess it, but she was clueless. She didn’t know what memories she was missing or how their relationship was before she lost her memory.
Also, she never ruled out the possibility that she had not lost her memories. She might have had her memories altered or wiped. It wouldn’t surprise her that much if it were true. Michelle was the only daughter of Archduke Philip Grace, who was originally from the upper realm, so how could Anastasia know that he didn’t give Michelle a tool or skill for memory wiping?
With a slow exhale, she traced the feathers on her forearms. Her Soul Leash. Michelle promised to train her to hide it, but the power she could feel from it just deepened her guess that the Archduke could have given Michelle an artifact for memory wiping. When just the speck of untrained soul energy she had was able to radiate power comparable to what she felt from Kieran, just what power could the Archduke have when he was from the upper realm, where he trained for decades, maybe even centuries?
Finally, she closed her eyes, forcing her thoughts to the corners. The next day, she would start putting the pieces together in her mind, but at the moment, she needed to rest. As Michelle had told her the evening before, she was exhausted from training her soul energy so much, so she needed to rest if she didn’t want to faint. Michelle had told her that after overusing her soul energy, she had to sleep for about a month, and Anastasia had no need to go through that.
The next morning, Anastasia woke up feeling better, and tied her hair in a high ponytail, changed into her training clothes, and went to the training grounds. The sun was barely peeking from behind the horizon, but she was guessing that Michelle was already there. Though Michelle didn’t tell her the time they should meet, Anastasia knew her well enough. She liked to get things done as soon as possible, so she could laze around the rest of the day. Or take care of something else.
As expected, Michelle was already sitting on the ground in the middle of the training grounds, using the alone time to get a better grasp of her own soul energy and Soul Leash. So when Anastasia entered, she saw thick black chains dancing around Michelle, with each black chain having a thin, nearly translucent golden chain coiled on its surface, looking more like a mark than a real chain. That was Michelle’s Soul Leash, keeping the soul energy in check.
"You came earlier than I expected..." Michelle opened her eyes when she felt Anastasia’s presence in the training grounds. "Did you rest enough?" she asked.
Nodding a bit, Anastasia walked over to Michelle. "So, how do we go about this?" she asked. "How do I make the feathers disappear?" she added.